augmented.org

Sony just showed their latest AR hype at the Games Convention in Leipzig. Again, a silly use of augmented reality, but I don’t mind! Every new technology starts off either for the military or by playing around as useless games (I prefer the latter). I hope to see it live in action to judge if the seen video material is all features there are (creating virtual wood car toys by drawing is fun, but is there more?) and how the tracking really works. Do we need that clean table? Light is obviously only guessed at. But a pretty good start! Check out the sweet as honey video for the whole family!

No, this actually has nothing to do with Apple Inc., but the cool concept designs from Mac Funamizu from Japan also have a nice iphone look and feel: it looks like you would take off the backside of your cellphone and all of a sudden the real world shows inside your touchscreen – overlaid with all the graphical augmented reality goodies there might be in 2008.. eh no, maybe 2013 or 2018? So, sorry, this is not documenting current work in progress, but only AR ideals for the next decade. The concept is very convincing, not talking about feasibility: a hand-held device like your phone, no goggles, instant access to virtual data connected to your frame you define by holding up the happy gadget: routing guides, tourist information, translation help for foreign newspapers… How cool would that be!?

Hey there,
it seems that Lego again proves itself as a cool company all children love. Designed for young wannabe engineer kids, this new show-off booth for the nearest toys’r'us or similar will keep your offsprings in the store and probably away from those old school virtual reality xbox 360s of this world! Check out the video below. It uses feature tracking for the Lego boxes without any additional marker. Pretty stable even with a lot of reflection. (OK, it drops sometimes.) But still: an ambitious agency that takes clever advantage of the AR hype! Neat!